Texas Town, Now Divided, Forged Bush's Firm Stand on Immigration

By JIM RUTENBERG

Published: June 24, 2007

Late last spring, Republicans in this West Texas oil town called for a boycott of Do?nita's Mexican restaurant, a retaliatory step against its owner, Luz Reyes, for closing shop and showing up at a rally against proposed new penalties for illegal immigrants.

But President Bush's three best friends here defied the boycott and went to the restaurant, Mr. Bush's favorite when he lived here, regardless. One of them, the president's close confidant and former commerce secretary, Donald L. Evans, told Ms. Reyes: ''Luz, you didn't do anything wrong. We love you.''

The hometown divide helps to shed light on a broader rift, as Mr. Bush and like-minded Republicans engage in an unusually contentious fight with the rest of their party in the national debate over immigration.

Mr. Bush has pursued a goal of providing citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants with rare attacks on his conservative supporters, who have derided his approach as tantamount to amnesty. There are various political motivations for Mr. Bush to push for his plan, including the rapid growth in the nation's Hispanic population, a voting group that he has long considered to be potentially Republican.

But the roots of Mr. Bush's passion lie here in Midland, now heavily Hispanic, the city where Mr. Bush spent much of his childhood and to which he returned as a young adult after spending his high school and college years in the more genteel settings of Andover and Yale.

As a boy, and later as a young, hard-drinking oilman, his friends say, Mr. Bush developed a particular empathy for the new Mexican immigrants who worked hard on farms, in oil fields and in people's homes and went on to raise children who built businesses and raised families of their own, without the advantages he had as the scion of a wealthy New England family.

The symbiosis fit with the Bush family's Northeastern, free-trade Republicanism, which took on a Mexican flair, especially after Mr. Bush's parents hired a live-in Mexican maid in Texas who became part of the family, and his brother, Jeb, married a young woman from Mexico who initially spoke little English.

But interviews in Midland also tell another story, of how a place that Mr. Bush credits with informing his relatively liberal views on immigration has started to move away from him.

Central to the shift is the perception among some in this city of about 100,000 people that he does not understand the sense of siege that has set in about the illegal population that has grown considerably since he traded the Texas governor's mansion for the White House seven years ago.

''There's just a real disconnect between the folks of West Texas and the president right now,'' said Mike Conaway, who was the chief financial officer for Mr. Bush's oil exploration company here in the 1980s and now represents the area as a Republican in Congress.

The disconnect has been exacerbated by a steady increase of illegal immigrants since Mr. Bush left the state, and newspapers reported on the strains on social services that they have brought. It is visible on a grand scale, with Mr. Conaway and this state's two Republican United States senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, breaking with Mr. Bush on immigration in recent months after having followed his lead with Rolex reliability for most of his term.

And it is visible in smaller, more personal terms here in Midland, with the boycott that some Republicans called against Ms. Reyes's restaurant. The dispute put Mr. Evans and the rest of Mr. Bush's friends -- who used to join Mr. Bush and his wife there nearly every Friday night -- on the opposite side of the local Republican Party, including its chairwoman, Sue Brannon.

Mr. Evans said his appearance at the restaurant after the boycott had been called was ''just dinner, not a political statement'' against fellow local Republicans including his close friend Ms. Brannon.

But to Ms. Reyes, who has known Mr. Bush and his wife since their twins were in baby carriers, and who recounted the encounter with Mr. Evans in an interview at her restaurant, it was an important show of support from a group she still calls ''the Bush clique.''

New Beginnings

George H. W. Bush came to the Midland-Odessa area in 1948 when his son George W. was 2, hoping to make his own fortune in oil. He eventually formed a drilling company, the Zapata Petroleum Corporation -- named for the movie ''Viva Zapata!'' about the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata -- and later took as a partner Jorge D? Serrano, a contender for the Mexican presidency before being imprisoned for fraud.

Friends of the current president have recalled how they occasionally saw Mexican workers in his father's oil fields, part of a steady trickle of new immigrants from the other side of the Southern border who also took jobs as ranch hands, maids and groundskeepers.

Randall Roden, one of Mr. Bush's close childhood friends, recalled an upbringing that included ''being aware that there were people who were poor and hard-working, and just looking for better opportunity, and a chance to do just about anything.''